David Goodwin has posted a new book review of a PHP book offered by Packt Publishing (released Sept 22, 2007) - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects" by Shu-Wai Chow.

Some time ago, Packt publishing sent me this book to review. Here it is, being somewhat overdue!

He talks about the book's contents - the different chapters detailing the different services' APIs, the protocols that are used to talk to those services and the data formats your scripts would have to be able to talk in to communicate. He recommends the book to those looking to get started with mashups specifically, but warns that in some places the book tends to "reinvent the wheel" rather than using classes/packages that already exist.

On the PHPClasses.org website there's a new book review posted from Alexandre Altair de Melo about a new book from Packt Publishing - "PHP 5 CMS Framework Development" (by Martin Brampton).

Often developers have to think about several aspects of the architecture of a system for the Web, not necessarily restricted to requirements of the software. With this in mind the book "PHP 5 CMS - Framework Development" is very rewarding reading.

Alexandre talks about the author of the book, the wide range of topics discussed in it (some not just applying to CMSes) and a breakdown of the contents of each chapter.

It is great work from the book author and the publisher, as we now have another great title, not only about PHP, but also about designing an architecture for software not just for only for creating content management systems.

Ken Guest has posted a book review today of an offering from Packt Publishing, Learning Facebook Application Development (by Hasin Hayder and Dr Mark Alexander Bain).

The book was published prior to Facebook's facelift but this doesn't really impact on the usefulness of the book. An overview of FBML, FQL, FBJS (a restricted subset of JavaScript and enforced for security reasons) are given along with information on how to use the test consoles, publish to news feeds, some multimedia aspects of what can be done in Facebook applications and more.

He notes that the book focuses on a PHP5-only world for developing the apps and opts for MySQL as the database of choice. Overall, he found it useful - more so than the online documentation, especially for beginners.

Over on the PHP Zone (from the DZone community site) there's a in-depth tutorial looking at the creation and management of an access control system (users, passwords and what they can do) in your PHP application. It's an excerpt from the Packt book PHP5 CMS Framework Development.

Many websites will want to control who has access to what. Once embarked on this route, it turns out there are many situations where access control is appropriate, and they can easily become very complex. So in this chapter we look at the most highly regarded model role-based access control and find ways to implement it. The aim is to achieve a flexible and efficient implementation that can be exploited by increasingly sophisticated software. To show what is going on, the example of a file repository extension is used.

They talk about some of the general considerations about access control (limiting the number of rules, common difficulties) and plenty of code/database schema to get you started.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review (from Ivo Jansch) about a recently release offering from Packt Publishing - "Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management" (by Marc Delisle).

I mainly use phpMyAdmin for 2 things: browsing the data in the database, and changing the structure of a database. Those are pretty straightforward features, so when packt publishing asked me to review a book on phpMyAdmin, I initially wondered how they could write an entire book on phpmyadmin.

Ivo was pleasantly surprised at the features of the popular database management tool the book covered and notes that it does a great job of explaining the features a config options the tool has to offer. He notes that there's a pretty broad target audience for the book - everyone from the beginner out to the experienced developer wanting to know know about this popular application.

Stefan Priebsch has posted a book review of Packt Publishing's "Mastering phpMyAdmin" (by Marc Delisle of the phpMyAdmin team).

Kshipra Singh of Packt Publishing was kind enough to send me a copy of Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 For Effective MySQL Management to review. The author is Marc Delisle, phpMyAdmin developer and one of the project administrators since 2001. You probably can't get a better author for that kind of book.

Stefan talks about a few of the chapters - the introductory material, one on exporting database structure and data, a look at the relational system and a look at bookmarks (a way of storing statements for later use). He does recommend the book, though, noting that it's crammed with enough information to make it worth the price.

Kae Verens has posted a review of another of Packt Publishing's PHP-related offerings, "Learning PHP Data Objects" by Dennis Popel (published in Aug 2007).

Learning PHP Data Objects, by Dennis Popel, is an introduction to PDO, which walks through the building of a believable test example - a library manager for your home library. [...] I really couldn't find very much about this book that I didn't like. Ignoring the appendices, the book is 154 pages purely devoted to teaching PDO through examples, including error handling, working with BLOBs, even the creation of the M in MVC (Models).

The review mentions Models, Active Record and how the book creates a Library manager application that includes the use of prepared statements and transactions.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted a book review of an Packt book, "Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5" (by Hagen Graf - the book, not the review):

The book is a tutorial guide to Joomla! 1.5 and was already written and published during the development of Joomla! 1.5. This is the final version and it aims for "web developers, designers, webmasters, content editors and marketing professionals" and is suitable for anyone starting out with Joomla! 1.5, for people who upgrade to Joomla 1.5 and for those who just want a good printed guide/manual at hand.

The review steps through the chapters, highlighting points of interest and the wrapup uses terms like "great instructional value", "very passionate about Joomla!" and the fact that the only thing the reviewer sees missing of a chapter about security.

Stuart Herbert has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing covering one of the most popular PHP-based database administration packages out there, phpMyAdmin, "Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management".

Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management by Marc Delisle is the third edition of this book, and it follows the usual pattern of Packt Publishing books. The book has clearly defined objectives on the cover, and it follows a clear progression of its chosen subject from start to end. It is well presented, with a clear layout and clean page design that makes it easy to read.

Stuart gives a high-level overview of both phpMyAdmin ("it feels like phpMyAdmin as been around forever") and the book with an index of the topics covered.

Rob Allen has posted his review of another PHP-related book from Packt Publishing, "Object-oriented Programming with PHP5":

Packt Publishing recently sent me a couple of books to review, so let's start with Object-Oriented Programming with PHP5 by Hasin Hayder. According to the introduction, the book is intended for beginners to intermediate PHP5 programmers and the first chapter has a good introduction to what object oriented programming is and why you would want to use it.

He glosses over the first few chapters of the book (introductory stuff mostly) and points out three others specifically - Chapter 5 covering reflection and unit testing, Chapter 6 covering the SPL and Chapter 9 dealing with SimpleXML and DOM.